Apple has always been good at cutting the cord on older
technologies. It has moved Macintosh computers to new families of
processors, dropped support for floppy and optical drives, and replaced
its classic Mac operating system with OS X.
First released in 2001, OS X has been continually revised; 2009's
seventh-generation Mac OS X 10.6
Snow Leopard dropped support for older Macs built using PowerPC
processors, but was otherwise - similar to Windows 7 - a modest release
optimizing the previous version.
OS X 10.7 Lion, released
July 20, is more ambitious, with changes starting with the way it's
distributed and installed. It's not available in stores and not sold on
disc; instead, it's a download from Apple's Mac App Store.
Priced at $29.99, the 3.5 GB file takes about an hour to download.
Especially nice (Microsoft take note!), users with multiple Macs only
have to buy it once; it can be downloaded free for installation onto
additional systems. Users can also save the installer onto a blank DVD
disc or USB flash drive, but do this before running the installer,
because once you've upgraded, the install file vanishes. A $69 version
on a flash drive is promised for some time in August.
Once again, Lion cuts the cord to older technologies. You'll need a
dual-core Intel-powered Mac with at least 2 GB of memory, and Lion
lacks support for software written for older PowerPC Macs. (Read this for
help checking whether you're using any of these older programs.) I was
keeping financial data in an older version of Intuit's Quicken and
needed to export my data prior to installing Lion. Afterward would have
been too late!
A migration assistant imports settings, data, and applications from
another Mac or a backup; Lion's version can also import Outlook email,
photos, and other data (but not applications) from a Windows PC.
Lion promises 250 new features. Several give your Mac some of the
look and feel of an iPad or iPhone. A Launchpad icon displays icons of
your Mac's applications, mimicking the iPad home screen.
Applications can be viewed in full-screen mode, again a la
iPad. And laptop users will discover new iPad-like gestures, including
a trackpad that scrolls in reverse: moving two fingers downward scrolls
up - the opposite of how it's previously worked. (Don't like it?
Uncheck what Apple calls Ònatural scrolling".)
As on an iPad or iPhone, text auto-corrects, while holding down a
letter like Òe" pops up accented and other variations - finally,
an easy way to make those sorts of additions!
However, you can't run iPhone/iPad apps on your Mac.
Other improvements are under the hood. Lion installs a hidden hard
drive recovery partition. Along with Apple's Disk Utility for hard
drive repairs, it includes a built-in web browser so you can search
online for solutions. (Hold down the Òoption" key at boot up for
access.)
You can encrypt your entire hard drive and Time Machine backups;
previously, you were limited to your documents. When you boot your
computer, it will automatically load applications and documents that
were running when it was shut down. There's system-wide support for
auto-saving documents and for accessing older versions.
AirDrop is perhaps the easiest way to share files with other
computers across a local network.
Boot time and performance seem on par with the previous version,
despite all the new features.
Many of these new features, including full-screen mode and document
auto-saving, require applications that have been rewritten to support
them. Apple's applications (mostly) are Lion-friendly; other
applications will have to gain support in a future update. And AirDrop
works only with recent Macs.
Assuming you're not dependent on old PowerPC-era Mac software, Lion
is an affordable and attractive upgrade for Mac users.
First published in Business in Vancouver August 9-15, 2011 issue #1137.
